silber@voodoo.ucsb.edu (12/15/89)
-Message-Text-Follows- It occurs to me, with respect to discussions about cognitive competence, to reflect on the necessary role of emotional components in all aspects of human cognition. Perhaps a von-neumann strong-ai machine/program of the traditional kind can never instantiate 'consciousness', not because it is computationally incompetent, BUT because it is emotionally incompetent????
smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar) (12/15/89)
In article <3312@hub.UUCP> silber@voodoo.ucsb.edu writes: > >It occurs to me, with respect to discussions about cognitive competence, >to reflect on the necessary role of emotional components in all aspects >of human cognition. Perhaps a von-neumann strong-ai machine/program of the >traditional kind can never instantiate 'consciousness', not because it >is computationally incompetent, BUT because it is emotionally incompetent???? This is not that different from the path of reasoning which eventually led Marvin Minsky to the material in his SOCIETY OF MIND book. If you go back to his original paper on K-line in COGNITIVE SCIENCE, he is arguing that constructs such as frame-based systems which basically provide powerful handles on declarative representations may be the wrong way to approach models of memory. Instead, he advocates an approach to memory in which something more like feelings (he uses the word "dispositions") provide the primitive elements. He has yet to get around to being very specific about just what these dispositions are and how they would relate to an implementation of a memory model. The heart of the matter, however, seems to be the ability to induce a mental state from which an agent is "disposed" to take particular actions. In other words, if we think of an intelligent agent (the whole ball of wax) as some sort of enormous state machine in which each state has an effect on the actions which may be performed (and this is, admittedly, an over-generalization for the sake of explanation), then we should be asking questions like: "How does perceiving a given situation put the agent into a state from which it will take an appropriate action?" Given what we know about human behavior, it should come as no surprise that emotions often play a greater role in determining what state we are in than do any objective operations of inference on a set of facts which delimit a problem statement. ========================================================================= USPS: Stephen Smoliar USC Information Sciences Institute 4676 Admiralty Way Suite 1001 Marina del Rey, California 90292-6695 Internet: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu "For every human problem, there is a neat, plain solution--and it is always wrong."--H. L. Mencken
traiger@oxy.edu (Saul Traiger) (12/16/89)
In article <3312@hub.UUCP> silber@voodoo.ucsb.edu writes: >It occurs to me, with respect to discussions about cognitive competence, >to reflect on the necessary role of emotional components in all aspects >of human cognition. Perhaps a von-neumann strong-ai machine/program of the >traditional kind can never instantiate 'consciousness', not because it >is computationally incompetent, BUT because it is emotionally incompetent???? An excellent starting point for this issue is Chapter 6 of John Haugeland's book, Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea (Cambridge: MIT/Bradford Books, 1986). ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo o Saul Traiger oooooo Cognitive Science o ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo o Internet:traiger@oxy.edu *----* Occidental College o ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo o CIS:71631,717 oooooo Los Angeles, CA 90041 o ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
bwk@mbunix.mitre.org (Kort) (12/16/89)
In article <3312@hub.UUCP> silber@voodoo.ucsb.edu writes: > It occurs to me, with respect to discussions about cognitive competence, > to reflect on the necessary role of emotional components in all aspects > of human cognition. Perhaps a Von-Neumann strong-ai machine/program of > the traditional kind can never instantiate 'consciousness', not because > it is computationally incompetent, BUT because it is emotionally > incompetent???? It is my thesis that a learning system necessarily exhibits emotional behavior. As a scientist, I frequently experience the emotions of curiosity, puzzlement, frustration, boredom, exhilaration, anxiety, confidence, and satisfaction as I explore, ponder, get stuck, make progress, develop understanding and gain insight into the systems that I study. It occurs to me that any learning system must experience such states, and alter its goals and strategies accordingly. Metaphorically speaking, emotions are the first derivative of the learning curve: E = dK/dt where E = Emotional State and K(t) = Knowledge. I once wrote a pair of whimsical Socratic dialogues between a pair of anthropomorphic self-programming computers to illustrate this idea. If you are interested, I would be happy to share them with you. I nice feature of this theory is that it tells me what to do with my emotions: Emotions tell me what I (and others) need to learn next in life. --Barry Kort